Sea Stories is a collection of creative nonfiction essays centered around the growth of a young woman through her experiences with water and ships. The pieces trace the origins of the narrator's tie to water from a childhood involving boating with her dad to sailing a brigantine across the Pacific Ocean and then a six-year career as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. The narrator's relationship with her father, predominantly viewed through their shared intimacy with water, is a base theme for the whole collection. Other themes explored in individual essays include reckoning expectations with reality, explorations of the self in and against a group, gender dynamics in military service, and the influence of fiction on life. Sea Stories shows that what we think we know, what we may have only imagined, and on the water, that self-constructed reality can be a dangerous thing.

Amelia Earhart opened the skies for many female pilots in the 1930s. It was because of her that many young women followed their reverie to becoming a pilot. This dream led many to answer the call when the United States Army Air force needed ferrying pilots when World War II began. Female aviators were contracted as civil service personnel and placed in different units to ferry planes across the country and to tow targets during live ammunition practice by combat soldiers. These units were later combined to form the Women Air force Service Pilots (WASPs). The anomaly of the WASPs was that they were the only women’s unit who joined a men’s only division of the Army, though they were not considered to be full military personnel. Never before had the United States government allowed female pilots to participate in the military. While providing aerial support services for the United States Air Force, the WASPs were not granted military benefits, nor were they considered part of the military, despite being required to follow all military protocols. In 1977, after Congressional hearings, the WASPs were finally granted full military honors. This dissertation examines the experiences of those women within the context of the institutions of higher education where they were trained and in terms of the varied forms of discrimination that they faced, highlighting the ways in which they navigated those challenges.